Native Tongue (51 page)

Elgin explores the nature, power, and significance of language through the distinction between humanoid and non-humanoid languages, and the different worldview each constructs. Any language is a limited set of perceptions and expressions; the rough similarity of humanoid languages, and thus the rough correspondence of their worldviews, is what allows them to be Interfaced. Dramatically different worldviews separate humanoid and non-humanoid languages, and thus the realities they construct, which explains the dangers of Interfacing humanoid and non-humanoid languages. The government technicians, in an effort to work through the problem of non-humanoid languages, articulate the relationship of language to reality:

“First principle: there’s no such thing as reality. We make it up by perceiving stimuli from the environment—external or internal—and making statements about it. Everybody perceives stuff, everybody makes up statements about it, everybody—so far as we can tell—agrees enough to get by, so that when I say ‘Hand me the coffee’ you know what to hand me. And that’s reality. Second principle: people get used to a certain kind of reality and come to expect it, and if what they perceive doesn’t fit the set of statements everybody’s agreed to, either the culture has to go through a kind of fit until it adjusts . . . or they just blank it out.” (140)

Elgin puts it this way in the epigraph to
chapter 13
: ‘“For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction”’ (145). Thomas Chornyak describes the failure to Interface with non-humanoids as an intrinsic limitation: “It was distressing, but it was not ridiculous.
No human being could hold his breath for thirty minutes; that was a natural barrier, and one learned not to fling oneself at it. No human being, so far as he knew, could share the worldview of a non-humanoid. It was not ridiculous” (66). The Government Work technicians articulate the intrinsic limitations more specifically as ‘“human beings are hardwired to expect certain kinds of perceptions”’ (140). Language, then, is both biological, in that our biological brains can form certain kinds of perceptions, and cultural, in that every language and culture uses a smaller set of perceptions and expressions from the larger set of hardwired possibilities.

This imbrication of the physical and the social is demonstrated most forcefully when the technicians pursue the experimental Interfacing between human infants and non-humanoid aliens despite warnings of disaster from the linguists. The leader of the group, Showard, finally concludes, “‘There’s something about the way the non-humanoid aliens perceive things, something about the “reality” they make out of stimuli, so impossible that it freaks out the babies and destroys their central nervous systems permanently’” (141). One infant, in an attempt to Interface with Beta-2, the resident non-humanoid alien, had convulsed so violently that it “literally turned itself inside out” (48). That the problem is not simply one of human linguistic and cognitive limitations is demonstrated by the subsequent experiment, in which the technicians try to alter consciousness and thus worldview by feeding the infants hallucinogens (186). This time, when they get the dosage “right” and Interface the infant, it is the alien being, Beta-2, that goes mad and dies, showering sparks throughout the Interface (188). The infants who survive the experiment cannot, so far as other people can tell, communicate in any way comprehensible to humans, although they appear normal and healthy.

The constitution of reality through language is more than simply a psychological effect in
Native Tongue
. As the Interfacing experiments reveal, language has the power to fundamentally reorder the material world, producing vibrant life or violent death. Moreover, language is constitutive in a number of other ways. A large part of the popular prejudice against linguists stems from their ability to manipulate verbal and non-verbal language. John Smith, a government liaison to the linguists, “knew that there was absolutely nothing an ordinary citizen could do if a linguist decided to structure an encounter in such a way that that citizen would look like a perfect ass” (63). And he knows this is also true of the linguist women: “Oh, they observed all the forms, those women; they said all the right words. But they had a way of somehow leading the conversation around so that words came out of your mouth that you’d never heard yourself
say before and would have taken an oath you couldn’t be made to say” (63). Examples of this linguistic power dynamic abound, both between linguists and citizens (“Thomas tilted his head a fraction, and Jones felt deeply inferior for no reason that he could understand” [63]) and between male and female linguists. For example, Rachel is unable to countermand her training as a linguist and resort to tears (“Women of the Lines learned early not to give in to tears . . . because tears destroyed negotiations” [149]) and she thus fails in her attempt to dissuade Thomas from marrying Nazareth to a powerful linguist she hates. In fact, a frequent refrain in the book is “you can’t lie to a linguist.”

The prodigious control the linguists maintain over the deployment and interpretation of language extends to the power male linguists wield over the female linguists. When Nazareth’s love for Jordan Shannontry is exposed, leading to her familial humiliation, the worst pain comes from her inability to express the experience: “And there were no words, not in any language, that she could use to
explain
to them what it was that had been done to her, that would make them stop and say that it was an awful thing that had been done to her” (201–02). Elgin contrasts this despair with the relief felt by the women of Barren House when they can finally use the “right words” of Láadan (267). Along with its constitutive and manipulative powers, language also has the power to produce emotional comfort through consensual validation. Thus English expresses the experiences of the men and especially the linguist men relatively well and completely, creating in them a sense of justification and self-righteousness. For the linguist women, on the other hand, the available language fails to match their set of experiences, and they feel a host of negative emotions.

Despite their appreciation for the power of language and their grip on well-known linguistic principles, linguist men are unable to evade the constitutive power of gender relations. Thus the linguist men fail to apply this information to their own families. The constitutive link between language, gender relations, and reality is expressed in the women’s search for a believable suspect for the attempted poisoning of Nazareth. Precisely because religious and reproductive rebel Belle-Anne is already assumed to be insane, she can act as decoy and confess to Nazareth’s attempted murder, thus distracting the men of the Lines from the subversive activities taking place in the Barren House. Belle-Anne’s tale of heavenly mandate and the hordes of he-angels does not fit the reality set of her immediate acquaintances and it is dismissed as the ravings of a madwoman; ironically it is precisely because she has already been
disbelieved
that she is now believed.

The linguist men are aware that the women are constructing a women’s language. Their assumption that women have inferior linguistic skills blinds them to the women’s true strategy: the women’s decoy work on the false project of Langlish, an elaborate and unworkable female tongue, screens their
real
work on Láadan. Viewing the Langlish Encoding Project as harmless and time-consuming, the linguist men are trapped by their assumption of female inferiority, encapsulated in their convenient repetition of the fact that language skills are not correlated with intelligence (15–16). Only after Láadan is spoken and taught to the little girls does anyone recognize the power of the project. Even then, despite all of the evidence presented at the family celebration to all the men of the Lines, only Thomas recognizes the “‘danger’” and “‘corruption’” present (281) in what appears to the others as “charming” and “endearing” (276).

In certain ways, Láadan is deceptively simple. Encodings are “‘the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to
deserve
its own name’” (22). When the women create Láadan, then, they are not simply creating new words. They are, in fact, reordering what is significant and not significant, perceived and not perceived.

Láadan, the true women’s language, is both the culmination of and the evidence for the idea that language can change reality. While Láadan is still a secret, the men describe the women as constantly frowning, complaining, weeping, nagging, pouting, sulking, bitching, and arguing (289). Further, they frequently accuse women of talking endlessly about things no one would find important, and even then of never getting to the point (264). Verbal exchanges between male and female linguists are contentious and combative. Once Láadan is in place, however, women are happy, effective, self-sufficient. This reordering has profound effects on the world of the linguist men as well as the women. After Láadan has been in general circulation for about seven years, the men notice a change in the behavior of the women. Adam reports to Thomas, “‘Women, they tell me, do not nag anymore. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick—can you believe that, Thomas? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics . . . or if there still are such things, at least they are never mentioned’” (275). But what appears to be a good change, a benign change, from
the initial point of view of the men, is revealed as something both larger and more disturbing.

When the men of all of the Lines get together to discuss the “problem” of cooperative, cheerful women, the stakes of their behavior become clear: “‘It used to be,’ [Dano Mbal] said, ‘that when a man had done something in which he could take legitimate pride, he could go home and talk to his wife and his daughters about it, and that pride would
grow
—it would be a reason to do even more, and do it even better’” (290). In his mind, Adam continues the corollary:

It used to be that a man could do something he was
ashamed
of, too, and then go home and talk to his women about it and be able to count on them to nag him and harangue him and carry on hysterically at him until he felt he’d paid in full for what he’d done. And then a man could count on the women to go right on past that point with their nonsense until he actually felt that he’d been justified in what he’d done.
That
had been important, too—and it never happened anymore. Never. No matter what you did, it would be met in just the same way. With respectful courtesy. With a total absence of complaint. (290)

The new language, with its new set of values and perspectives on reality, thus changes the way the men and women of the Lines relate to one another. In effect, the women are no longer playing the linguistic games that support a binarized and hierarchized version of gender. The male response to the new world created by Láadan is, ironically, to do just what the women have desired: to move all of the women into their own residence. A shift in language has thus produced, albeit slowly, a real, measurable, and enjoyable change in their daily lives.

Of course, language is not entirely all-encompassing; knowledge can exist outside of language, which is precisely the urgency to produce new Encodings. We can see this in the book through Nazareth’s unexplainable sense that the women’s elaborate contingency plans are missing the point (271), the idea that even babies make (unpronounceable) statements about experience (141), and the experience of the LSD tubies, who are silent because for them, perception of reality is not linguistic (167). But the success of Láadan in emancipating women from oppression materializes the ways in which language can, quite literally, alter reality.

Elgin’s second main concern in this novel is gender relations, and more specifically, the balance of power between the sexes. The world of
Native Tongue
takes place in a period of dramatic feminist
setback. March 11, 1991, sees the landmark passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment (repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that granted universal female suffrage) and the Twenty-fifth Amendment (affirming women’s universal secondary and protected status) (7–8). Women’s subordinate status is so ingrained and unquestioned that Aaron Adiness, as a young boy, believed his grandfather was a liar because he said women were once “allowed” to vote, be members of Congress, and sit on the Supreme Court (17). While the injustices of a male-ruled world are made clear, Elgin also demonstrates the complexity of effort and institution required to maintain such an unequal and dehumanizing system. The male assumption of female inferiority rests on three main tenets: that women are biologically inferior, that there is a natural hierarchy of the sexes, and that a woman’s value derives from her basic reproductive usefulness. Women are variously described as more primitive than men (151) and as “rather sophisticated child[ren] suffering from delusions of grandeur” (110). Both statements presume not only that women and men have different biological complexities, but that a more complex organism is more intelligent and more worthy of rights; such claims were frequently used in nineteenth century science to justify racism, and have been widely criticized since. Evidence to the contrary in the novel, such as Nazareth’s incredible linguistic ability, is explained away with the oft-repeated fact that “language acquisition skills are not directly correlated with intelligence” (279).

The idea of biological hierarchy grounds the society’s gender relations, which mandate female subservience and male protection rather than equality. When Rachel and Thomas fight about Nazareth’s prospective marriage to Aaron Adiness, Thomas is driven to rage by what he sees as Rachel “forget[ting] her place” (151). More than twenty years later, as the men discuss Nazareth’s cancer and the appropriate medical response to it, Thomas remarks, “‘We do feel—and, I might add, we are obligated to feel—more than just a ceremonial regard for the women in question’” (10). Even something as presumably female-oriented as gynecology is reinterpreted to focus on men: “‘Let me tell you what gynecology is. What it really is. Gentlemen, it is health care for your fellow
man
—whose women you are maintaining in that state of wellness that allows the men to pursue their lives as they were intended to pursue them. As this country desperately needs them to pursue them’” (225).